1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an application server for dispatching physiological signals in a hospital, in real time. These signals may be auscultation sounds, electrocardiograms, electro-encephalograms, etc.
One of the uses of this application server is the teaching of auscultation to medicine students in a hospital. Auscultation consists in listening to sounds from the organism, in particular heart and lungs. Classically a medicine professor teaches auscultation in a patient's bedroom, by describing to students, what he/she is hearing. Then, each student auscultates the patient with his/her own stethoscope. He/she tries to find the right place where to put the chestpiece of the stethoscope, and tries to hear what the professor described. On one hand, this is quite unpleasant to the patient and on the other hand, this is not an objective way of teaching auscultation, this is not what is called today “evidence based medicine”.
Some methods for auscultation teaching use recorded auscultation sounds, on cassettes or compact discs, but these methods are not as efficient as live capturing of auscultation sounds in real time on a chosen patient, together with relevant comments and description provided by an experienced practitioner. Some manufacturers provide additional listening units that make it possible to connect several headsets to a personal computer processing the auscultation sounds, so that several students are in a position to listen simultaneously to the same sounds. But this is a local operation limited to the lengths of the wires or tube of the headsets. This is not applicable to remote operation over networks such as legacy telephone networks, or cellular infrastructure, or over Internet.
In the existing solutions, when a practitioner wants to get a second opinion about a patient, he/she must request a colleague to come to the patient's room because there is no easy way to communicate the auscultation sounds to a colleague. When a practitioner wants to store a phonocardiogram, an electrocardiogram, an electro-encephalograms, in the patient's medical file, there is no easy way to send it to a central database connected to the hospital infrastructure and that stores the patients' files.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There exist electronic stethoscopes of the type comprising a microphone, electronic sound processing means, and sound reproducing means, such as a loudspeaker or headphones. An electronic stethoscope gives the possibility of active amplification and filtering to any desired degree. The output of an electronic stethoscope can be linked to a personal computer or a personal digital assistant for analyzing and displaying waveforms, for instance a phonocardiogram.
For teaching auscultation, an electronic stethoscope can be linked to a loudspeaker or a plurality of headphones to enable a plurality of students to listen to the auscultation sounds and to the professor's comments in real time. However this way of teaching auscultation implies to gather the students near the stethoscope, i.e. around the patient's bed. This is also unpleasant to the patient. It would be more comfortable for the patient if the professor was alone with the patient, and if the students could stay and listen in another room, or several other rooms.
One could consider connecting an electronic stethoscope to the telecommunication network of a hospital for dispatching an auscultation signal to a plurality of students outside the patient's bedroom. However there arise some difficulties inherent to the telecommunication networks in hospitals. Nowadays such a network is based on the Internet Protocol, and is generally separated in two parts: one supporting data, and one supporting telephony. The access to the part supporting data is forbidden for protecting the security of confidential data. The part supporting telephony is at least one virtual local area network (VLAN) supporting voice over IP (VOIP), and it is more easily accessible. However safety means prevent the multicasting of a signal to several destinations.
Thus, there is a need to provide a technical solution for dispatching a physiological signal to a plurality of destinations via the telecommunication network of a hospital.
This can be solved by the application server according to the invention.